Reason
by loutzy
Summary: ONE-SHOT. Reason was stainless-steel and stingingly sharp. It always had been, in his life. He had never met Hermione Granger until she spilled blood - red, untainted blood onto his drawing room floors. Blood that, when he returned to his childhood prison, kept him up until the early hours of the morning... COMPLETE. Warning: Non-descriptive self-harm.


He had never hated the colour red until he met Hermione Granger.

And though they had met countless times before through vile words and hissed threats (even looking back on such times now brought upon the hiccup of vile that so wished to push past his throat), he profoundly believed he never truly met the girl he had plagued until he had seen her wither underneath the knife of his own blood. This was never what he had wanted; and yet, the memories of his actions proved otherwise.

He had never met Hermione Granger until she spilled blood - red, _untainted_ blood onto his drawing room floors. Blood that, when he returned to his childhood prison, kept him up until the early hours of the morning, scrubbing and scraping away at the memories of her pain, his sanity becoming as worn-out as the Malaysian blackwood floors that creaked beneath him. And still, her screams echoed around him. Still, his drawing room drew him into the dead, cold reality of his atrocities.

And even when the floor was free of her bodily fluids, even when he analyzed the damage his hard brush had caused the valuable, influential _Malfoy_ estate, he was still _filthy_. A word that had seethed through his clenched teeth far too many times, always directed in wrongful conviction. In his world, his _sadistic, barricaded world_ , she had been guilty of filth long before he had ever given her a trial. His hand was raised, finger pointed at the perpetrator of such contamination. But he was a blind man.

A blind man who never truly gained the right to see again until he had finished the task of digging up his own grave. A blind man who only gained sight after his realization that the finger he held up had lead him to an mirror-image of himself.

So, he scrubbed harder as her cries tore through his mentality, shaking him to his very core. And when, finally, he could no longer differentiate between the cries that escaped his lungs and the cries that wracked his soul, he left.

Left in search of Reason. And he found it.

Reason was stainless-steel and stingingly sharp. It always had been, in his life.

And he had thought, so many times, that his actions in atonement for his father were acts of courage. That his knife-like threats against the people his family seemed to detest oh-so much had sprouted from the seeds of ignorance disguised as valour his father had placed within him so long ago.

But, of course, he had never truly known the meaning of knife-like until he met Reason.

He should have known when to put down his swords. When valour preys on Reason, it eats the sword it fights with. He should have understood what so many around him seemed to understand.

Draco always found his way back to the sharp edges that presented themselves to him during his time alive. He had backed himself into the knife Tom Riddle claimed to be Valour, had been pierced by the spikes of Righteousness and Purity his father would bark at him, had even fallen into the claws of Upright Nobility. But he had yet to fool around with Reason.

And it was about time.

He didn't know what to expect when the knife carved into his hand. Possibly a brighter tint of red, a _purer_ looking brand of blood that would seep out of his wound and confirm that, _no, your pain in this war was never all for not!_ He even, for a split second, considered a blue-tinged blood – blood of the Noble and Pure, _royal_ Malfoys/Blacks.

But, one must understand, Reason has a way of twisting one's gut inside-out in order to prove its point. And Draco Malfoy had never met something so sharp (not Purity, not Righteousness, _nothing)_ that it could pierce through his soul.

And it was all the same.

His blood had never been pure. And now, with the blood he had on his hands and the blood that covered his hands, he had never felt as far away from true cleanliness before.

They had lost the war, and all this time, he believed that Purity and Valour would bring order to a world that had only been made chaotic to him since childhood due to the notions of Purity. He watched as such notions ripped families apart and covered his only wholesome childhood memories, memories of classes and innocence, memories of Quidditch and crushes, with the very same blood of his classmates. And when the voice of Impurity ripped through the pain and the blood to announce that, _Alas, Potter is dead,_ he truly thought that Riddle had won and that life as he knew it was gone. But Potter fought with the sword of Reason.

And it appears that Reason has a far deeper cut.

Draco let his own dark liquid fall from his hands onto the kitchen floor as he dropped them to his sides and wandered back to the drawing room. A room that drew far more than blood from him.

And he never knew that he could hate the colour red so much and the confirmation that followed so closely behind it's river.


End file.
